Every site that I've looked for info on customizing a LAN connected to FiOS has offered variations of this:
- configure the ActionTec as a WAN bridge.
- buy a different router and customize that.
- connect them together.
Why don't people hack directly on the ActionTec? It's running OpenRG (linux) with BusyBox and supports local telnet. I find it hard to believe that no one has been able to get around the security controls.
Note: technically, DD-WRT has made a ROM to reflash the router, but it loses its FiOS capabilities, which completely defeats the purpose for me.
Update: attempting to put non-ASCII characters in the SSID results in:
Input Error
Service Set Identifier must consist of 1 to 32 characters
and must not contain any special character.
Update 2: Information about MI424WR command structures
You can read and write configuration values using conf print
and conf set
commands.
However, even when I try to use TELNET BINARY mode on my client, the router appears to be running in 7-bit ASCII mode, which rejects the high-bit characters. So now I need to figure out if it is possible to connect in 8-bit mode, or to assign arbitrary byte strings using some ASCII encoding.
Update 3: Getting closer
Due to space limitations (and presumably a desire to lock down the router) the selection of installed software is very limited. In particular, it has no file editors or find/replace utilities, so making changes directly on the router is difficult.
The only file loading option is TFTP. By running a TFTP server on your PC and connecting to it from the router shell, you can download files, edit them, and upload the changes into place.
Update 4:
Instead of wpa-supplicant.conf (as suggested in the answer), the MI424-WR uses Hostapd, with conf files stored in /etc/hostapd/
However, /etc/hostapd/wpa-ath0.conf is overwritten upon reboot; the settings are stored somewhere else (probably a non-text encoded binary) and merely loaded into hostapd.
The admin web service loads static web pages from /home/httpd/html, but most of the pages are dynamic, and they do not appear anywhere in the file listing.